Immigrant Concentration in Schools and Youth Mental Health: The Role of School Loneliness and Belonging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: This study examined the association between youth immigrant generation background and mental health outcomes (internalizing and externalizing symptoms), the extent to which these associations were moderated by school immigrant concentration and the potential mediating role of school loneliness and sense of belonging in these associations. METHODS: Data come from a population-based cross-sectional study of 1,449 immigrant and nonimmigrant youth aged 9-15 years and their caregivers from 36 schools in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Multilevel hierarchical linear regression and multilevel structural equation models were run separately for parent and youth reported internalizing and externalizing symptoms. RESULTS: First- and second-generation immigrant youth had lower levels of parent and youth reported externalizing symptoms and parent reported internalizing symptoms than nonimmigrant youth. The association between immigrant background and externalizing symptoms was moderated by school immigrant concentration, such that higher concentration was associated with a decrease in average externalizing symptoms for immigrant students, but not for nonimmigrant students. Perceptions of loneliness at school mediated the association between immigrant background and both externalizing and internalizing symptoms when school immigrant concentration was high across parent and youth reports (conditional indirect effects all p < .05). DISCUSSION: Levels of mental health symptoms were lower among immigrant youth when school immigrant concentration was high, with decreased perceptions of school loneliness potentially offering some insights into protective mechanisms. Longitudinal studies are needed to advance our understanding of the underlying social processes that give rise to differential associations across immigrant groups to inform school-based approaches to integration of immigrant and nonimmigrant youth.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".